Quandary

Quandary

Content Marketing Agency

PROJECT: Create a name for a content marketing agency that solves the paradox of companies that have become too busy to create the valuable content that made them busy in the first place.

QUANDARY: The “negative” dictionary definition of the word quandary — “uncertainty over a decision” and “a good word to use when faced with a dilemma that has no easy solution” — adds creative friction, which greatly increases the value of this name as a brand.

BRAND POSITION: Ed Rivis is a brilliant internet content consultant and thinker who grew his marketing consultancy into a mini-empire in the UK with book and DVD sales, sold-out lectures, a top-ranked website and many clients who lined-up to hire him to create valuable web content for their companies. Soon, Ed was very successful, and very busy, too busy developing content for other companies to continue creating the the valuable blog and Internet Marketing content that was one of his main sources of new clients. He considered outsourcing his web content needs to ghost writers, but he didn’t believe a ghost writer could meet his high standards or speak in his true voice. So as he became more successful, the very thing that brought him success, his authentic, valuable content, began to wither.

In short, Ed was in a quandary. His eureka moment was to realize that many other businesses were probably also in this same quandary, which presented a fantastic new business opportunity. So Ed created a marketing content creation company to solve this paradox for himself and his clients. All he needed now was a name that could live up to his vision.

Ed brought that vision, and his business plan, to Zinzin, and we delivered. Quandary has a built-in narrative that supports the unique selling proposition of Ed’s agency. It tells a great story, and everyone who hears it is immediately intrigued and wants to know more, one of the most important functions of a brand name.

Of all the names we developed and presented to Ed for this project, Quandary was the most difficult for a typical naming committee to adopt as a brand, because most such committees would assume that the “negative” meaning of the word would be taken literally by clients. Fortunately, Ed was smart enough to realize that once a name has been put into a brand context, people don’t take “negative” definitions literally, and with minimal effort will make the leap of understanding that Quandary is all about solving quandaries, not creating them. A great bonus is that because of the “negative” meanings, no companies had been willing to use the name Quandary (there were zero UK trademarks for Quandary for anything!), which automatically strongly differentiated it.

Ed wanted a game-changing name for his new agency, and he got it. Only a company that is supremely confident that it can solve “dilemmas with no easy solutions” could pull off a bodacious name like Quandary. And isn’t that the kind of the company you’d want to hire?